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About Joburg’s early days

From Stone Age hunter-gatherers to fierce warriors, farmers and gold diggers, Johannesburg has a chequered and interesting history.

 

 

VAST open land as far as the eye could see with untouched vegetation, no houses or roads, just a few scattered black villages – this was all that the landscape once had to offer.

 

These were the pastoral views that greeted the early white settlers, long before gold was discovered and the construction began that would change this land and transform it into what can now be described as a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis.

 

Approximately 900 years ago, South Africa’s “city of gold” was the largest “kingdom” on the sub-continent, according to The Joburg Book, edited by Nechama Brodie. Settlers were separated, with the elite living high on a hill while commoners and livestock occupied kraals below.

 

During the 14th century, early groups of Tswana- and Sotho-speaking people moved towards the centre of the Highveld, gradually constructing stone-walled settlements.

 

In its early days, the area now known as Johannesburg was occupied by people whose language originated from the Niger-Congo region. Known as Bantu people, they lived in scattered villages. Evidence of these settlements can be seen from aerial photographs that show kraal rings, usually located on koppies.

 

Earliest inhabitants

In a cave on the western ridge of Melville Koppies Nature Reserve, on the western side of the city, Professor Revil Mason, a former head of archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand, found “six pieces of broken arrow points, of the kind used in Botswana until recently … and a groove stone which would have been used for shaping the arrows”.

 

It is reported that the objects were about a thousand years old and would have belonged to Bushmen.

 

These Bushmen or San were hunter-gatherers, following the herds of wild animals that migrated across the plains. They predated the Bantu people in South Africa, possibly dating back 30 000 years. They carried their shelters with them or made use of caves; on moving on, they often left behind artefacts and rock paintings.

 

These record their beliefs and rituals. These Stone Age people made use of their surroundings to sustain themselves, for example using ostrich eggshells for storing water.

 

Evidence of early settlement

Melville Koppies and Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve, in the south, are the only remaining areas that still have evidence of these early settlements.

In the early 1960s, an Iron Age furnace was discovered by Mason in the central section of Melville Koppies. It is now a national monument.

 

Visible only to the trained eye, at the top of the ridge was a ring, which led to the discovery of fragments of charcoal, slag raw iron and broken blowpipes on the floor of the furnace. To date, three other such furnaces have been found on the ridge. Others have also been discovered across Joburg – 13 in Honeydew, three in Lonehill, one in Northcliff and one near Bruma. There is a plaster cast of this furnace in the Wits archaeological department. Mason estimated the furnaces dated back to around 1060 AD.

 

Evidence of dry stone-walling at the koppies shows that there were permanent settlements in the area. The same walling can be seen at the Klipriviersberg Nature Reserve, where 19 stoned-walled Iron Aged settlements are evident, dating back to 1500 AD.

 

These Iron Age communities appeared to co-exist peacefully for the most part with the region’s hunters-gathers, made up of the Bushman or San people, who had inhabited southern Africa since the Stone Age.

 

These early settlers had no knowledge of the gold beneath them well until the 19th century.

 

Johannesburg’s settlements spread from Northcliff and Lonehill in the north, to Melville in the west, Bruma in the east and Klipriviersberg in the south.

In the 1820s, Mzilikazi’s warriors, who fled from the Zulu king, Shaka, and his impies in KwaZulu-Natal, passed through the Highveld, robbing villages and settlements as they passed, according to Brodie. They eventually settled in the area, and Mzilikazi controlled land from Heidelberg westwards. By 1827, he had created a new capital in the Magaliesberg, 80 kilometres northeast of Johannesburg.

 

It is believed that a drought hit the area, wiping out the settlements. The Voortrekkers, Afrikaans farmers migrating northwards from the Cape, moved into the area and in 1837 Mzilikazi was forced into Zimbabwe. The Voortrekkers took large chunks of land as their farms but all that changed in 1886, when gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand.

 

According to Brodie, the gold was buried deep inside the ground, locked under a dense layer of rock and when it occasionally surfaced as an outcrop it was unrecognisable. “The gold was locked in a dense layer of rock conglomerate studded with quartz and pyrite, which would eventually require sophisticated machinery and complex chemical processes to extract it.

 

“The higher density of the gold meant that the metal ‘fell out’ of suspension at the same time as the large quartz pebbles and rounded pyrite [iron sulphide] pieces, and into the gravel rich delta. This became the conglomerate that is mined today.”

 

The discovery of gold

After assumptions that gold was to be found in the region, according to a quote in Brodie’s The Joburg Book, George Harrison wrote an affidavit to then president of the republic, Paul Kruger, in 1886: “My name is George Harrison and I come from the newly discovered goldfields Kliprivier [in Johannesburg] especially from a farm owned by a certain Gert Oosthuizen. I have long experience as an Australian golddigger and I think it a payable goldfield.”

 

These assumptions were made after gold was found a few hundred kilometres east in Barberton, in modern day Mpumalanga. The discovery began a massive gold rush, with people flocking here from around the world to buy up land.

 

“Modern Johannesburg began, effectively, on 20 September 1886, when Paul Kruger, president of the ZAR [Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek], declared the area open for public digging,” Brodie writes.

 

The first to discover gold were the Struben brothers, Fred and Harry, who owned parts of the adjoining farms Sterkfontein and Wilgespruit in what is now Roodepoort.

 

Their discovery came about after a visit from a neighbouring farmer, Louw Geldenhuys, about rocks on his farm Wilgespruit, which now lies in the western part of Johannesburg. Fred Struben was consulted as he had a reputation for his expertise in geology.

 

The brothers discovered what appeared to be the first “payable” fragments of gold in 1884, and called their mine Confidence Reef, but the mine lasted no more than a year.

 

There are conflicting reports on how Johannesburg got its name: from being named after Johann Friedrich Rissik and Christiaan Johannes Joubert, the two men sent by president Paul Kruger to establish a mining town; veldkornet Johannes Petrus Meyer in " recognition of his willing, able and ungrudging service" as referenced in James and Ethel Gray’s Payable Gold; and even Kruger paying tribute to the Portuguese king, João (Johannes).

 

Johannesburg as a city

People continued to flock to Johannesburg in search of gold, causing it to expand. It was declared a city in 1928 and developments sprang up as it kept pace with other flourishing cities such as Paris and London.

 

Towards the end of the 19th century it already had electric lighting, motor cars and telephones. In Johannesburg’s Firsts, Smith elaborated on the city’s expansion.

The first trams came in 1888; the first gas lamp was lit in 1892 and in 1895, the first electric street lamp was installed on the corner of Rissik and President streets. And the spotting of the first car, which was used for advertising, was in 1897. Electric signs came in 1905.

 

Johannesburg’s first train tracks were laid in 1888 from Johannesburg to Boksburg, on the East Rand, which formed the first tram. The first road was created in 1889 and ran from Ferreira’s Camp to Jeppestown and down Commissioner Street.

 

As gold was being found across the city, people started making transactions, which initiated the first bank. The Standard Bank opened on 11 October 1886, in a tent. From there, the bank moved into a thatched cottage.

 

This was followed by the first postal service in 1887, the first barber shop, and the first brewery – also in 1887. It is reported that the first tent was erected in 1886, two months before gold digging started in earnest, and the first building to go up was the Central Hotel. Made of wood, it was built in Ferreira’s Camp.

 

From these beginnings, a great city was born, which today is home to more than three million people, with more arriving from across African daily, still lured by the promise of a better life.